Posts Tagged ‘SAGE’

This post is about Sharif CERT (APA) center's recent CTF (10 dec 2012), which is one of a kind in Iran. Most CTFs are a few days long since there are time-zone differences, but since this one is in Iran, its only a few hours long and full of pressure.

Also it is fairly general purpose, with Trivia, Web Hacking, Cryptography, Steganography, Reverse Engineering and Forensics amongst it genres. There's also the final scoreboard of the contest. As usual, team AbiusX nailed this CTF, though this was the initial round and the main round is held inside Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

APA CTF usually pisses me off, as some questions are not technical and more of a puzzle than a question - as you will see soon - and also because the guys in charge of making up questions have a very poor English (rofl). But it's getting much better over the years and this version was perfectly acceptable, specially the parts about segmenting different teams' flags.

There were 2 trivia questions, 4 web flags, 2 reverse engineering flags and the rest each had one flag. Genre scores were 100 for trivia, 1200 for web, 200 for crypto, 600 for reverse engineering, 300 for steganography and 400 for forensics, plus bonuses for quick solvers.

The Questions

This section will describe each questions, its strengths and weaknesses and the solution to it.